Market Structure (ICT)
Premium / Discount (Optimal Trade Entry) Zones
Split any swing in half. The bottom half is discount, the top half is premium, and a narrow band between 61.8% and 78.6% of the way back down is what gets called the optimal trade entry.
Drag your entry, then let the retracement decide
A fresh impulse leg draws itself in. Drag the gold line to wherever you'd want to buy the pullback, inside the OTE band, elsewhere in discount, or even up in premium if you want to see what that does. Press play and a real retracement runs bar by bar, if your line gets touched, the trade fills there, and the continuation leg afterward shows what that entry was actually worth.
Impulse leg is up. Drag the entry line, then press play.
How it works
- Premium and discount are relative, not absolute. They only exist in relation to one specific swing, the exact same price can sit in discount on one swing and premium on the next.
- The 50% line is the actual dividing wall. Anything below the midpoint of the swing is discount, anything above it is premium, no exceptions.
- The OTE band narrows the discount zone further, to a specific 61.8%–78.6% retracement window. That range comes from Fibonacci retracement levels, not from anything unique to this page.
- A line that never gets touched isn't a loss, it's a trade that never happened. The stats below only count entries that the retracement actually reached.
- A deep enough retracement blows through every zone, including the swing low itself. When that happens the whole premise, that this was a pullback inside an intact uptrend, is already wrong.
Where this breaks
A better zone doesn't guarantee a better fill
Entries inside the OTE band get a tighter, more precise stop and a larger distance to run if the move resumes, which is the honest case for using it. What it can't promise is that price actually gets there. A shallow retracement that only dips into upper discount or stays in premium the whole time will never fill an OTE-only order, leaving that entry on the sidelines while a looser, less precise entry higher up gets taken and starts working immediately. Run this simulation enough times and both outcomes will show up, a well-placed order that never fills contributes nothing to the running average, it just sits in the missed count. Zone quality and fill probability are two separate questions, and this page tracks both on purpose instead of only the one that flatters the OTE idea.